Army says Beauchamps stories are bogus

NY Times:

An Army investigation into the Baghdad Diarist, a soldier in Iraq who wrote anonymous columns for The New Republic, has concluded that the sometimes shockingly cruel reports were false.

“We are not going into the details of the investigation,” Maj. Steven F. Lamb, deputy public affairs officer in Baghdad, wrote in an e-mail message. “The allegations are false, his platoon and company were interviewed, and no one could substantiate the claims he made.”

...

Michael Goldfarb, the online editor at The Weekly Standard who had initially raised doubt about the columns, wrote yesterday that The Standard had learned from a source close to the Army investigation that Private Beauchamp “signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in The New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods — fabrications containing only ‘a smidgen of truth,’ in the words of our source.”

Earlier, The New Republic had conducted its own investigation and found only one inaccuracy: the story about the disfigured woman had occurred in Kuwait before the unit arrived in Baghdad.

Yesterday, The New Republic posted another note on its Web site saying its editors had spoken to Major Lamb and asked whether Private Beauchamp had indeed signed a statement admitting to fabrications. “He told us, ‘I have no knowledge of that.’ He added, ‘If someone is speaking anonymously [to The Weekly Standard], they are on their own.’ When we pressed Lamb for details on the Army investigation, he told us, ‘We don’t go into the details of how we conduct our investigations.’

...

TNR appears to be on tenuous ground in it denial. I suspect the ground Pvt. Beauchamp is on is also pretty difficult at this point. One of the interesting aspects of this war is that virtually every bogus story about it has been written by an anti war activist. That tells you something about their passion and their willingness to say or do anything to lose this war. Some one could do a long story or even a book on all the bogus stories that have come out of the anti war left in the Iraq war.

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post has a nice summary of facts in this case and the strange denials that still come from TNR. Why they would continue to cripple their credibility by denying the obvious is less than obvious.